Esther J. Cepeda: Will ‘sleeping giant’ wake?

CHICAGO — With but a few weeks until
Election Day, now is as good a time as any to review some recent headlines
about the Latino vote.

In early September, Emmy Award-winning
actress America Ferrera gave attendees at a Democratic National Convention
forum a hard-core reality check.

“It is incredibly dangerous to take for
granted that because Latinos are growing in number in this country this is
going to equal political engagement and political resolve,” said Ferrera. “One
doesn’t automatically lead to the other.”

She was speaking the truth, of course.
But after a full year of breathless coverage about how this could be the year
Latinos determine the outcome of the presidential election — who can forget
Time magazine’s first-ever Spanish-language cover “Yo Decido” (“I decide”) last
March? — some folks are just plain freaked out.

Naturally, then, when Mitt Romney joked
at a fundraiser that he’d have an easier time getting the Latino vote if he
were Hispanic — and I dare anyone to pretend this is not true — people were
upset.

Shortly after, President Obama was
grilled by news anchors at the Spanish-language channel Univision and, in a fit
of Hispandering, declared that not passing comprehensive immigration reform was
the biggest failure of his first term.

Really? It wasn’t his administration’s
failure to make job creation and economic recovery the top priority from Day
One in office? The only real surprise was that Obama didn’t get pilloried in
the mainstream press for such outrageous remarks, but I guess what gets said on
Spanish-language TV stays on Spanish-language TV.

Nearing the end of September, a civil
rights group called the Advancement Project put out a report that said changes
in voting rules could deter 10 million Hispanics from exercising their
franchise.

The report was right in the wheelhouse
of those who have been pushing the idea that Republicans have entered into a
national conspiracy to deny minorities the right to vote, but more sober
Hispanic vote-watchers wasted no time in weighing in.

“I think the number is a little bit
exaggerated,” Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Elected and
Appointed Officials told a reporter for Voxxi, a Hispanic news website. Angelo
Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy, said that
lacking any viable projection for measuring Latino turnout, the numbers are
speculative at best.

What you probably will find surprising
is that the Pew Hispanic Center says that as many as 71 percent of Latino
registered voters support laws that require voters to show photo identification
to cast a ballot, a number tacking pretty closely to the 77 percent of all
registered voters who support such measures.

A whopping 97 percent of Latinos
surveyed said they are confident they have the ID needed to vote in their state
and 95 percent said so in the 11 states where the ID laws are already in place.
But you won’t hear much about this because it doesn’t play into the victim
narrative I see so manyorganizations promoting.

Then there’s Hispanic voter enthusiasm —
various polls say there isn’t much of it. A recent Impremedia/Latino Decisions
survey implied that this may be related to Hispanic registered voters not being
very familiar with Latino elected officials.

Thirty-six percent of respondents had
never heard of Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles mayor and chairman of the
Democratic National Convention Committee. Fifty percent had not heard of New
Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, one of the top speakers at the Republican National
Convention, and 38 percent had not heard of Florida Republican Sen. Marco
Rubio, who goaded Obama into action on DREAM Act-eligible students.

This spurred the talking heads to
comment that the candidates needed to do more to shore up Hispanic support.

Please. The candidates have just spent
Hispanic Heritage Month pleading for Latino support. Hispanics who don’t know
who their top U.S. political leaders are just haven’t been paying attention.
They’ll be to blame if 24 million voting-eligible Latinos don’t make election
history this November and instead keep the “sleeping giant” comfortably tucked
in bed.

ESTHER
J. CEPEDA is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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